Fatigay had replied uneasily, “Grant and Thompson are excellent fellows. We were inseparable in the old days, and I hope we shall be again.”

“Then you’ll have to be separable from me,” she had retorted. “No man can serve two masters, and if you choose to trample on everything I hope I stand for by introducing those clownish philistines into our life together — well, I’m afraid I can’t bear with it. I blushed for your connection with them, and for mine with you, at every word they said.”

“Oh come!” he had replied, “Amy, you must admit they’re not as bad as all that. They’re not exactly highbrows, I’ll agree, but two better-hearted fellows never breathed. They do their own jobs well enough, I can tell you, and that’s more than can be said for the crowd of chatterers you’re so fond of, and, as for your disliking them, you can’t hate them half so much as I hate that wretched little Dennis Tickler who’s always hanging round this place.”

At this Amy had become very angry.

“Look here, Alfred,” she had said. “My friends are cultured and intelligent people, and Dennis is one of the best friends I have. If you want to say anything against him, or any of them, whom goodness knows I’m always trying to get to like you, you can clear out.”

“Well, why should you speak against my friends?” he had muttered.

“If I become your wife at all, Alfred,” she had said, piercing his heart with the words, “we must have our friends in common. I’m not going to be dragged into association with people of that sort, nor sit by on the shelf like a chattel and see you degraded by them. Friends, indeed! People you’ve not seen or heard from for years, and who came, anyway, only to make a butt of you. Perhaps you didn’t see the glances they gave one another behind your back while we were talking, but I did. I’d like to know any real friends of yours, but these — ! Alfred, you surely wouldn’t put your relationship to them before your love for me, would you? Yes or no?”

Here Mr. Fatigay had looked sadly bewildered, for in such arguments the real tussle lay between his heart and his reason, rather than between Amy and himself; they were conflicts in which she played, from outside the region of stress and wounds, the decisive part of an Homeric goddess.

“And to return to what I was saying,” she had said, when she had extracted a halting negative from him, and had lovingly transformed it into a gracious and chivalrous promise before storing it safely away in her memory, “I was saying that Emily’s no use to me. She’s either more stupid even than the rest of her species, or else maliciously sulky. To hear you talk of buying spectacles for her, as if she was human, makes me feel that the jungle must have turned your brain. The zoo’s the proper place for an ape, after all, where she could have the company of her own kind, and I really think we ought to send her there. I don’t feel that I can stand her stupid dirty ways much longer.”

Emily had here stared open-mouthed at her protector. She had already heard enough to furnish a sleepless night with new meditation on her folly in ever hoping that he would be disillusioned by hard treatment. And now he was being tried even nearer home. What would be the result? she wondered.

Fortunately Mr. Fatigay had here a middle course to resort to, and one which baffled for the time Amy’s petulance at his overscrupulous regard for the chimp.

“Why, of course, Amy,” he had replied, “if you find Emily unsatisfactory, there’s no need for you to keep her. I’d hoped she’d please you, but if she doesn’t I can easily take her back now I’ve got a place of my own.”

“Oh, don’t bother,” Amy had said crossly. “You’d only spoil her worse than ever. If she doesn’t go to the zoo, she may as well remain with me. I’ll try to put up with her a little longer.” For she could think of no excuse for insisting that Emily was to be sent into captivity, and, indeed, found her so cheaply useful, and so satisfying to torment, that she would not have suggested it, but for her annoyance at Mr. Fatigay’s concern for the humble creature.

Thus the matter had been left, but Emily felt that she had escaped by chance rather than by Mr. Fatigay’s power to resist his love on behalf of his lover. This, as much because it augured so ill for his future welfare, as because it implied the nothingness of her claims beside Amy’s demands, was the cause of her present depression, which, occurring as it did just when her access to the anodyne of study had been cut off, through no fault of her own, weighed so heavily upon her that her dream of a jungle hermitage now gave place to the more practical consideration of whether she would not, after all, be wise to seek as a cloister the very prison to which Amy had proposed sending her.

“After all,” she said to herself, “the jungle would only be so much scenery. The greatest tragedies are played best in the severest of settings. Given peace and loneliness, what matter whether it is the innumerable trunks of trees or the nearer austerer verticals of bars which hem me in?

“But,” she added, “I had better go first and see what it’s like, lest it should turn out in this case as it has with love and England, from both of which — despite their importance culturally — I would have fled as from the plague, had I but had a true glimpse of them beforehand.” And wasting no more time on reflection, Emily set forth, putting up her parasol, which she had again brought down with her, not for vain display, but from a sincere desire to shelter herself from the casual glances of the masculine crowd.

A heavy thundershower, shortly after noon, had discouraged the sightseers, and Emily, descending on the inner side of the fence, found almost unpeopled the wide and stiff-flowered spaces, into which, with their surround of skeleton domes, ringed craters, and Giotto crags; with their watercress teas like memories of childhood; with not knowing which way to turn amid staccato cries of unknown emotion; into all of which one enters as into the excitement of a half-familiar dream.